ArticleMolecular biology and evolution2021
Convergent Biochemical Pathways for Xanthine Alkaloid Production in Plants Evolved from Ancestral Enzymes with Different Catalytic Properties.
Article in Molecular biology and evolution, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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11 citing papers in PubMed, 14 citations in OpenAlex.
- A case study of evolutionary variability and determinism among type III polyketide synthases.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Conservation of IAMT Preference for Indole Acetic Acid Methylation Across 250 Million Years of Seed Plant Divergence, With Only One Recent Evolutionary Switch in Ocimum.Genome biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Convergence and parallelism in the evolution of plant metabolism.Journal of integrative plant biology · 2026Review
- Ipecac alkaloid biosynthesis in two evolutionarily distant plants.Nature chemical biology · 2025Article
- Multiple transitions to high l-DOPA 4,5-dioxygenase activity reveal molecular pathways to convergent betalain pigmentation in Caryophyllales.The New phytologist · 2025Article
- Yerba mate (eLife · 2025Article
- Applications of ancestral sequence reconstruction for understanding the evolution of plant specialized metabolism.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Evolution of the biochemistry underpinning purine alkaloid metabolism in plants.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Recurrent evolutionary switches of mitochondrial cytochrome c maturation systems in Archaeplastida.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Exploring the Evolvability of Plant Specialized Metabolism: Uniqueness Out Of Uniformity and Uniqueness Behind Uniformity.Plant & cell physiology · 2023Review
- Phylogeny-Aware Chemoinformatic Analysis of Chemical Diversity in Lamiaceae Enables Iridoid Pathway Assembly and Discovery of Aucubin Synthase.Molecular biology and evolution · 2022Article
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4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Convergent evolution is widespread but the extent to which common ancestral conditions are necessary to facilitate the independent acquisition of similar traits remains unclear. In order to better understand how ancestral biosynthetic catalytic capabilities might lead to convergent evolution of similar modern-day biochemical pathways, we resurrected ancient enzymes of the caffeine synthase (CS) methyltransferases that are responsible for theobromine and caffeine production in flowering plants. Ancestral CS enzymes of Theobroma, Paullinia, and Camellia exhibited similar substrate preferences but these resulted in the formation of different sets of products. From these ancestral enzymes, descendants with similar substrate preference and product formation independently evolved after gene duplication events in Theobroma and Paullinia. Thus, it appears that the convergent modern-day pathways likely originated from ancestral pathways with different inferred flux. Subsequently, the modern-day enzymes originated independently via gene duplication and their convergent catalytic characteristics evolved to partition the multiple ancestral activities by different mutations that occurred in homologous regions of the ancestral proteins. These results show that even when modern-day pathways and recruited genes are similar, the antecedent conditions may be distinctive such that different evolutionary steps are required to generate convergence.
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